In the coming months, vaccine nationalism is likely to compound Covid-19 economic damage and penalize more lives. It reflects the utter failure of multilateralism. It is old colonialism in new disguise.

AFTER mid-January, World Health Organization (WHO) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that due to unequal Covid vaccine policies, “the world is on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure, and the price of this failure will be paid with lives and livelihoods in the world’s poorest countries.”